Since I wrote about Facebook recently I should probably make some kind of comment. They've introduced a new simplified "privacy" settings page, and the design of the new page fits very well into their carefully-managed "you are an idiot and need to be talked down to" user interaction concept. It is claimed that you can now disable the interests -> "Connections" forced conversion, but it's not completely clear to me how far that really goes. I logged on there and saw what looked like free-text fields, like they used to have; however, there's also a button to suggest "more" "Pages" I might be interested in, which seems to suggest that those free-text fields are still in some way linked to "Pages." Editing a profile page still triggers the prevent-you-from-closing-your-browser behaviour.

You can supposedly now disable the publicity of your selected "Pages," and that was the thing that the largest number of people were angry about recently; but I'm not absolutely certain that doing so means your name won't appear on the "Pages" themselves (which are where spammers will look). It may be that you're only disabling it from appearing on your "Profile," though perhaps in a more real (that is, API-affecting) way than before. They appear to have introduced, either in this revision or some earlier one, the ability to block the "Video" pseudo-application from putting stories in your news feed. That's something I'd very much wanted when I was using Facebook.

I'm unlikely to go back. As I said when I left, the real problems are not about "privacy." All the improvements fall under just part of one of the technical points I described in my earlier postings. As far as I can tell, none of my other complaints have been addressed.

2 comments

You're welcome! Now you have something to fill a couple of column inches. dagbrown - 2010-05-27 21:58

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEmss2lg-ug

I just checked your homepage and want more pies! Owen - 2010-05-29 11:37